Ethnographie des pratiques légales autour de la revendication des droits fonciers chez les groupes pastoraux de l’État de Khartoum

Abstract

Based on a long term anthropological fieldwork, this article focuses on the legal practices used by a pastoral group in the rural area of Khartoum State (Sudan), the Aḥāmda, in order to face the attacks against their land rights. Facing during the last decade a process of land grabbing on their tribal collective lands, the Aḥāmda root their claims upon a “tribal paradigm” of the multifunctional institution of the gabīla and display an “institutional bricolage” melting various legal sources and institutions (customs, state law, Islamic law; oral/written; state courts and tribal leaderships). Their conceptualization of the ‘urf is also examined in order to seize both the embeddedness of the juridical space into a wider socio-cultural domain and the “weakness” of the Islamic reference within the context of a country in which Islamization is a longstanding process and sharīʿa the main law regime since 1989.

Keywords

• Sudan
• pastoral nomadism
• collective lands
• tribal paradigm
• customary law/Islamic law